Clouds among the Stars. Victoria Clayton

you? Ma’s gone to have her jaw tightened and Ophelia’s in a state about Crispin’s desertion and Portia still isn’t back and I don’t like to ask Maria-Alba – she was so upset yesterday.’

      ‘Look, we can’t all go trooping along as though it was some kind of party. A little tact is called for.’ Bron pressed his chin into his neck and looked at me reprovingly. ‘I’m going to see Wanda.’ Wanda was Bron’s agent. ‘There should be some good piccies in the evening papers. They took hundreds from every angle and wrote down everything I said, like bees sipping nectar. I don’t suppose they often get the chance to interview someone highly articulate. Wanda particularly wants me to go to this party tonight to meet an important film director. It would be madness to hurl away all my chances just to visit Pa. Ten to one Marina Marlow will be there, and Pa won’t want grown children at his knee when he’s trying to lure the bird into the cage. Honestly, Harriet, you must try to put yourself in other people’s places. It’s no good just thinking about what would suit you.’

      My mother must have been right about Marina. It was selfish of me, perhaps, to be depressed by the idea. Derek suddenly took it into his head that down in the kitchen was the one thing for which he had been searching all his life and that nothing must hold him back from immediate consummation. His paws windmilled on the polished floor and my arms were pulled painfully in their sockets. I went downstairs with him, leaving Bron with the moral high ground.

       SEVEN

      ‘I shall call him Byron,’ I said. ‘After the poet.’

      ‘He doesn’t look a bit like a nasty old poet.’ Cordelia was feeding Derek with glacé cherries, which he was gobbling greedily. ‘I wish Bron had given him to me. He’s such a sweet little snookums. I’d call him Honeypot.’

      ‘You wouldn’t!’ I was revolted. Derek blinked and panted and laid his chin gratefully on Cordelia’s knee, showing a regrettable lack of taste.

      ‘Why not? Better than calling him after a boring, wrinkly old man.’

      ‘Byron was only thirty-six when he died. He was stunningly attractive and women fell in love with him by the lorry-load, even though he had a club foot. Besides he was a first-class poet,’ I added, attempting to redress the trivial aspects of my argument.

      ‘A club foot? Now that is romantic,’ Cordelia became dreamy. ‘Like Richard the Third, do you mean?’ This was Cordelia’s favourite film and every time it came to the arty little cinema down the road she made me sit through practically every performance. Laurence Olivier’s improbable wig sent shivers of delight through her and she made noses like shoehorns out of Plasticine for all her dolls. Now she got up from her chair, brought one shoulder up to her ear and walked about the kitchen, limping. Derek – Byron, I should say – was driven into a frenzy by this performance, racing several times round the table, jumping up at Maria-Alba and knocking the whisk from her hand.

      ‘Uffa! Senti!’ she said, fetching a cloth to wipe zabaglione from the table, chairs and floor. ‘Le cose vanno di male in peggio!’

      By which I understood her to mean that things were going from bad to worse. Derek was sick at her feet, the glacé cherries being conspicuous on their return. Maria-Alba flung me the cloth wordlessly.

      

      After a lunch that was rich even by Maria-Alba’s standards – chiocciole with walnuts and mascarpone, braised guinea fowl, tomatoes stuffed with rice and the zabaglione – for Byron’s sake as well as our tightened waistbands, we dragged ourselves out for a walk. The only thing I knew about dogs was that they needed plentiful exercise. Also Derek was such a tiring dog indoors that by the time he had gnawed the legs of the furniture, fought the rugs, eaten the lock of Garrick’s hair and knocked over almost every vase of flowers in the house, we were quite prepared to brave the newspaper men. That is, Cordelia and I were. Ophelia had appeared briefly for lunch, dry-eyed but subdued. She had confined her remarks to unfavourable comment on Derek/Byron, who, it must be admitted, behaved quite badly. He insisted on lying under the table, snatching our napkins from our knees and trying to take off our shoes. When we put him outside the room he cried continuously with a high-pitched whine until we allowed him back in.

      ‘This was a very bad idea of Bron’s,’ Ophelia said, somewhat savagely as I tied the dining-room curtains into loose knots to discourage Byron from thrusting up his head inside them and pulling down the interlinings with his teeth.

      ‘I expect he’ll settle down soon,’ I said. ‘You must admit he’s terribly sweet.’ There was about Byron a floppy, panting appeal that I was beginning to find quite irresistible. His nature was affectionate to a fault.

      ‘I admit nothing of the kind,’ said Ophelia, as she wrested her shoes from Byron’s jaws and placed them with the entrée dishes on the sideboard.

      

      Our walk was not particularly enjoyable. For one thing I was suffering from indigestion, having grossly overeaten to keep Maria-Alba happy. Also I had been obliged to jump up between each mouthful to rescue our goods and chattels from Derek. For another, the weather was damp and chilly, with water droplets condensing on one’s hair, face and hands. The reporters stuck to us like blowflies to a corpse as we wandered through the park, Byron pulling on the choke chain until his eyes were starting from his head.

      ‘You ought to let him have a good run, miss,’ said one of the reporters, wearying of my reply of ‘No comment’ to all his questions. ‘It’s cruel to keep them always on a leash.’

      I was cut by this accusation and, against my better judgement, I unhooked his lead. Byron at once changed down, revved up and sped away into the mist. It was a good hour later when Cordelia and I and the two reporters who remained loyal to the search, sank down hoarse and exhausted on the bench beside the war memorial drinking trough. The fog was much thicker now and we could see barely ten yards in front of us. My hair clung wetly to my forehead and my shoes were ruined.

      ‘This is a rum do,’ said the nicest reporter, whose name was Stan. ‘Likely the little blighter’s halfway home by now. Where did you say you got him from?’

      ‘I didn’t. I’ve no idea where he lived before. Perhaps he’ll be run over before he gets there.’ Low spirits dipped past the point of what was tolerable at the dreadful idea of Derek – we had given up calling him Byron – smoothed extensively over the surface of Shooter’s Hill Road.

      ‘I’d better go back now,’ said Cordelia, looking dutiful. ‘I promised Maria-Alba I’d help her make the strozzapreti for supper.’ Though strozzapreti literally means priest-stranglers, it is nothing more homicidal than a kind of pasta. I suspected there was a favourite television programme about to come on. ‘Don’t get all mopy, Hat. He’s probably waiting for us on the doorstep. Whatever anyone else says, I think he’s very intelligent.’

      During the last half-hour Derek’s reputation had been much sullied by the other reporter, whose name was Jay.

      ‘See if you can persuade Maria-Alba to cook something simple,’ I begged. ‘Sausages would be nice. I don’t know when we’ll be back from visiting Pa.’

      ‘I’d better come with you,’ Jay said to Cordelia, relief evident in his tone. ‘You’ll get lost in this fog.’

      ‘It’s just like that film with Doris Day, called Midnight Lace,’ said Cordelia. ‘It begins with her walking across a London park and it’s foggy and this voice says from behind a fountain – only you can’t see anyone – “Mrs Preston –” that was Doris Day’s name in the film, – “Mrs Preston! I’m going to kill you.” It’s a really spooky voice – sing-song Welsh – and Doris Day is terrified. Her husband’s incredibly swave and sexy, played by Rex Harrison …’ They were hidden from view by the drifting vapour long before I ceased to hear Cordelia’s voice describing the plot in fine